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Closing This Summer: Verizon To Scoop Up AOL For $4.4 Billion
MojoKid writes with this excerpt from Hot Hardware: We learned this weekend that AOL's dial-up business still has over 2 million customers who pay on average just under $21 per month for service. Regardless of how strange that seems to those of us that salivate over the prospects of gigabit Internet, folks are still clinging to 56k modems are adding millions to AOL's bottom line. However, also recall that AOL has a massive digital advertising platform with a heavy focus on the mobile sector and also owns a wealth of popular web destinations including Engadget, TechCrunch, and The Huffington Post. With this in mind, it shouldn't be too surprising that Verizon has offered AOL a marriage proposal. Verizon is acquiring AOL for an estimated $50 per share, which brings the total value of the transaction to $4.4 billion. Here are stories from The New York Times, NBC News, and NPR on the proposed sale, which it's worth noting isn't yet final, and is subject to regulatory approval.
Maybe Verizon can restart AOL's CD mailing service. They made pretty good coasters. And good fireworks shows when put in he microwave. Hehehe.
Not
Nobody clings to dialup, broadband not available in some places.
$100 for a 56k modem
Not having to talk to Comcast PRICELESS
Though not with AOL. I don't use it often but its simply there as an emergency backup to our unreliable cable broadband service which seems to go down about 1 or 2 days a month with no explanation or apology.
Yeah, this is the same AOL who 'bought' Time Warner when they were massively overly valued in the dot com silliness, using over-inflated funny-money stocks.
Time Warner couldn't puke them out fast enough to get them off their back, because AOL was so grossly inflated in value it wasn't funny.
I sincerely hope from what I've heard of Verizon that they choke on AOL like Time Warner did.
Honestly, is AOL worth $4.4 billion? Someone better be doing some proper due diligence on this one.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
An "AOL Time Warner company" .. oh everything old is new again!! :)
And have the AOL install disks (usually there were two, for no apparent reason) falling out of the shopping bag.
Great! Now I can have dial-up and crappy service rolled into one!
And is still worth *$4 BILLION* apparently.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Net Neutrality rules require carriers to treat everyone's content like everyone else's - you can't throttle or restrict traffic based on who it comes from or where it's going.
However, as I read them, the rules are less clear on what content PROVIDERS can do with their own content. And Verizon just bought (primarily) a bunch of content.
I can't charge extra to carry certain content? Fine. Now I buy the content, and change how it's delivered. I have "Huffington Post Free Edition," with limitations on speed, multi-media content, etc. Then, as an EXCLUSIVE offer to Verizon customers, I have "Huffington Post Express," which is the full site delivered at an actually useful speed. If Time Warner Cable wants to get the "real" Huffington Post (i.e. the "Express" edition) delivered to their customers, they have to license it.
Hey, presto! A world where the network providers actually CAN charge to deliver content preferentially. All it needs is for them to own the content in the first place.
I predict we'll see a lot more of these vertical mergers of content providers and networks, and there will be an increasing wave of "subscribers only" offers in the near future.
...or are they attached to their email address? I have "dial-up" through Earthlink, but only to keep the email address alive.
Lucky for Verizon, AOL's 56k isn't that much slower than their supposed "broadband" DSL.
Did I miss something? There is no company called AOL. Time Warner bought them out like 10 years ago. Is Time Warner the one selling off the AOL branch of products? If so, this is a Time Warner-Verizon deal.
Does AOL still exist ?? WTF ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Two million on dial-up? One tenth of that would've still made me surprised. USA truly is a third world shit-hole in many ways.
Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch...
Some number of those accounts are because people don't want to change their email address. To them it's like changing a phone number that they have had for 20 years - so they pay.
I am not sure how that breaks down - but I do believe that 5 or so years ago, the AOL dialup business was at 30-40 million subscribers.
Did I miss something? There is no company called AOL.
Apparently you missed a lot of things. There very much is a a company called AOL Inc which has annual revenues of around $2.3 billion.
Time Warner bought them out like 10 years ago.
It was 15 years ago and you have it backwards. AOL bought Time Warner, not the other way around. AOL shareholders owned 55% of the merged company.
Is Time Warner the one selling off the AOL branch of products?
AOL was spun off from Time Warner six years ago into an independent company.
If so, this is a Time Warner-Verizon deal.
No it isn't. Time-Warner has nothing to do with this deal.
Given my great distrust of Verizon, I'm seriously considering abandoning/boycotting any site currently hosted by AOL, such as "Engadget, TechCrunch, and The Huffington Post."
What an appropriate description. And my captcha was 'manure'.
I can not understand the leadership at Verizon. They seem to always do the opposite of what they should do.
For example, when the iPhone first came out, Verizon turned Apple down and lost quite a few subscribers to ATT. I wonder if the executive that made that decision kept his job?
More examples:
Red Box deal
Intel TV assets
and now AOL
There never appears to be a coherent thought process. The layoff thousands 3 weeks ago, going to lay off a lot more on May 22nd, yet there is money to waste on AOL. Funny thing is, I will probably be laid off after this year's contract negotiations are over, but my son will start working for Vz in June.
I bet they bag Wireline with the load debt so that Wireless books look great.
Maryland State Motto: If you can dream it, we can tax it.
What place can get dial-up but not satellite broadband?
How many of these AOL subscribers also pay for broadband, so that they can get a cheap second phone line from Vonage, just so they don't have to tie up their main line when they dial-in? I want to laugh, but sadly, this is probably a non-trivial number of people.
Captcha: quagmire
If you thought cancelling your AOL account was difficult before...
Now you get to deal with the Verizon Customer Retention Specialists!!!!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I keep thinking that Time Warner owns America Online. Just saying
Good thing AOL pissed away $100 billion dollars a few years ago, otherwise Verizon wouldn't have been able to buy them now.
Of course they were never really worth that $100 billion, but it must have been fun pretending they were.
It didn't take long for them to attack this guy that complained about Comcast.
My company moved from Seattle, because the basement we were in in Pioneer Square couldn't even get reliable POTS lines. Comcast didn't have service on the block, and there's no hope of DSL if a POTS line doesn't work. We fought CenturyLink for nearly a year before the phone lines became stable enough to use a modem reliably. We're now in the owners basement in Kirkland, and he has Frontier fiber. It's a pretty tight fit and illegal according to the zoning laws, but it's hard to find office space in the Seattle area with decent Internet access that isn't very expensive. Internet access here is just so limited in availability.
There's still probably some substantial revenue coming in from forgotten AOL subscriptions from elderly folks who thought they needed it to access the internet, but probably not 4.4B worth.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
A while ago, there were rumors of Yahoo and AOL merging. AOL was supposed to have tech to generate higher sales per ad, or something like that, and Yahoo had the properties to utilize the tech on. AOL and Yahoo both operated mainstream viewer web sites.
Why would a big telecommunications company want to own a bunch of social media web sites??? Hell, I think AOL is worth significantly less than $4 billion. It boggles my mind.
You're correct. Anything negative posted here about Comcast gets marked as a troll like this guy was. It's sad that while they have the government-granted monopoly here in Seattle that they do not offer service to much of the city. I'm tired of over twenty years on dialup. I bought my house here in 1995, so I can't easily move nor do I want to move into a condo which is the only type of building that Gigabit Seattle offers service in. Since they were bought-out by Wave, they have slowed expansion so I don't think there's any hope of ever getting faster service until my twins move out in about six years then I can move into a smaller place in a neighborhood that has Comcast.
Satellite costs more than dial-up but provides more use value to the subscriber. Think of it this way: satellite's throughput is a hundred times faster, but it doesn't cost a hundred times more.